Home > About > Conferences > Galway 2007 > List of Papers > Abstract: Flores Varona

Adventurers, Emissaries and Settlers: Ireland and Latin America
27-30 June 2007, National University of Ireland, Galway

Overview  - List of Papers - Schedule - Gallery
 

Abstract

The Irish element in José Marti's New York Chronicles

Félix Flores Varona (Universidad de Ciego de Ávila)

Dated between July 1882 and May 1891, The New York Chronicles, written by José Martí while exiled in the United States, reflect the most dissimilar aspects of life in the northern country, being Ireland and the Irish a recurrent topic of his journalistic works. Thus, Martí provided, with an ethnographical and socioanthropological approach, a peculiar characterization of the immigrated Irish community, including its participation in domestic politics. The struggle for the Irish independence found in Martí a remarkable correspondent. He not only referred historical facts in Ireland and the United States, but made a significant analysis of Irish contemporary history and essential reference to outstanding figures such as Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt, Charles Stewart Parnell and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Religious topics are also deeply treated, of which The Schism of the Catholics in New York or The Excommunication of Father McGlynn are topmost examples. Some of the distinguished exponents of Irish literature are either the object of brief but clever references, as in the case of William Carleton, John Boyle O’Reilly and Jonathan Swift, or constitute the centre of extensive critical texts as the ones devoted to Oscar Wilde. Other Irish or Irish-related figures are also referred to, among them, John Lawrence Sullivan, Elizabeth Moore, Henry George and Charles Bradlaugh. All these contents provided by Cuba’s national hero make The New York Chronicles an invaluable bibliographical source for the study of Irish presence in the United States in the nineteenth century.  

The Society for Irish Latin American Studies